


Zombie

by toejamfootball



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen, This is the one where Stiles is sad, also my headcanon of why Stiles knows as much shit as he knows, and stiles's own version of hell, and what stiles dreams about at night, okay let's be real this is basically a character study of stiles but with pretty words, that thing you call a drabble when it's too long to be a drabble but is still drabblish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-17
Updated: 2012-08-17
Packaged: 2017-11-12 07:52:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/488485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toejamfootball/pseuds/toejamfootball
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He can feel himself slipping. He can feel himself breaking, so slowly and so completely, he’s cutting himself with the mishandled shattered pieces of his being</p>
            </blockquote>





	Zombie

_If you’re going through hell, keep going_

Stiles Stilinski knew what aglets were before Phineas and Ferb made a song about them. He knows that plants can run fevers. He knows keeping a goldfish in a dark room turns it white. He knows every single continent begins and ends with the same letter - or so he’s heard, but isn’t North America and South America two separate continents? He knows that more money is printed for monopoly in a day than for the U.S. Treasury. He also knows Billy Gates is richer than every single country, except for eighteen; and he knows there are 257 countries, and that over half of them have freedom, unbeknownst to the average American history class. He knows that seventy percent of the planet is covered in water, but only one percent is drinkable. We are quite literally dying of thirst in the middle of an ocean, he sometimes thinks, when he can’t breathe and his lungs feel full of undrinkable water, rotting him to the core.

He knows that all humans are 99.9 percent genetically identical, and he knows that the theory behind this is the bottleneck effect; in which humans originated in Africa and the majority of the species died in a drought, back when Africa was a desert - to the effect of having a jar full of thousands of different kinds of jelly beans and shaking out eight and deciding those eight would carry every single possible gene for the future of the entire race - which is why humans are distinctly similar, in comparison to the vast diversity amongst animals. No amount of mutations could ever even out that playing field again, until the great disasters of the world - a lot of which are probably man created - continues to diminish our diversity, right up to the very day when there is no diversity at all; that day terrifies him. A fear unfounded really, since every species strives on blending in.

Stiles knows that humans are not actually 98 percent identical to apes, but more like 94 percent. And he knows that that 94 percent is only comparing how humans process proteins - the building blocks of our bodies functions - a coding that covers a total 2 percent of our entire make up, and that the rest of our bodies - junk DNA - is actually nothing like that of apes at all. He knows that there is a missing link, something scientists believe will inherently connect us to the perceived ancestors of our species, and no matter how many links we find, we will never find that missing link. We will see the full picture and never be fully convinced, and he understands how that feels - when a picture, when a connection defines who you are - who you think you should be and you need to find that so desperately, that you never truly realize it’s right in front of your face, there the entire time. Even a complete picture can seem fuzzy, no matter how hard you squint.

Stiles knows that ants can’t sleep and don’t have lungs and sometimes he wonders how that’s possible - to not need to process any form of oxygen - and he wonders if this kind of species is what makes life on other planets possible, and if maybe the entire world is just being too closed minded about it. He knows that sharks and ray fish are the only animals in the entire world who cannot get cancer, and sometimes when he’s weak - which is all the time - he does envy them that. His father thinks he has nightmares, and he uses that rationalization when he finds Stiles awake at three in the morning, on his computer, eyes red as if he’d taken a blow to the face - which he has.

Nightmares. That’s a reasonable thing to be expected. But Stiles doesn’t have the heart to tell him it’s not the nightmares. He will gladly take the nightmares if he never has to have that dream again. Waking up to breakfast, to sitting down at the table, with both parents and talking about the mundane things that used to compose every facet of his life. Being on the lacrosse team in the barest of senses, playing WOW, or letting Scott conduct a spelling test based on the dictionary when they get bored and seeing how long he can go before stumbling over one too many variations of a word he’s spelt five times already. Laughing. Joking. Not taking the whiskey bottle from his father. Not measuring out his mother’s medication. Not lying. Exchanging I love yous, like they’re second nature, like he was ever granted the privilege to say them his entire life. 

And then waking up, happy, whole, complete and getting halfway down the hallway - with the same stupid, clueless smile on his face - only to get hit with the startling, sinking, breathtakingly crushing realization that she won’t be downstairs - a blow so hard, he doubles over; he goes to his knees, he pushes out a startled, weighted breath that he can’t really feel. He drowns, feeling Matt’s foot on his chest all over again, gasping for air that refuses to come, and when it does come, it immediately dissolves into sobs. For so long after her death, he had panic attacks. He couldn’t breathe and while the panic attacks eventually stopped, he thinks that maybe he never really truly learned to breathe again.

Because they buried her beneath the ground six years ago. She won’t ever hear about him not playing lacrosse, because she can’t hear anything, ever again. And he can’t hear anything either. He forgets how she sounds within an hour of waking up, and he spends the rest of the day numbly, desperately trying to recall it, clutching at those nonexistent sound waves with aching, bleeding fingers. Trying to recall her last words, because even though they hurt, they were her. Her entire essence and forgetting them feels like a betrayal, like wasn’t she important enough - how do you forget things like that? - faces and voices and the way her smile was crooked and messy, and the way her laughter echoed, weightless - how do you forget things like that when they’re so important? Even if those elusive words were an apology he still can’t quite understand. Because Stiles Stilinski knows a lot of things, but he can’t seem to understand what his mother would ever have to apologize for, because she never did anything wrong. All she did was leave him, and every night she comes back to him. And he hates her for it.

Maybe that was why she had apologized. Because those dreams, they are hell. A perfect memory that never got to happen, a perfect memory that he would give anything to make happen - this is his Mirror of Erised - and the bone-tired reality of it is that it will never be possible, and that is what hell is. Existing in the nonexistent, wishing you could just stay for a second longer, because when he’s awake, it’s agony. When he’s awake, the entire world moves too fast, and too slow at the same time. When he’s awake, he can feel his relationship with his father crumbling in his hands, slipping through his fingers and falling like ash - light and heavy and elusive and no matter how hard he tries to follow it, to catch it, to paste it back together, he can’t get his hands on it again and when he tries - it feels like he does more damage than he does good.

When he’s awake, his chest feels heavy, compressed, like he’s holding his breath, waiting for something bad to happen. Because something bad always happens. He’s waiting for his father to die too, to leave him here. He’s waiting for Scott to fail. He’s waiting for the entire town to get washed in blood, like he feels he is sometimes. Blood that seeps so deep into his skin, he can scrub his skin raw and never really wash it away. Ingrained in his head. When he’s awake, he can’t breathe. And when he’s asleep, he never wants to wake up again.

He can feel himself slipping. He can feel himself breaking, so slowly and so completely, he’s cutting himself with the mishandled shattered pieces of his being, and he wants to help, but he can’t. And there’s that feeling that maybe he never could to begin with - that they’re losing, and he can see them losing and there’s nothing he can do about it. He’s failing. And he’s drowning. And he’s tired, but he’s scared that if he goes to sleep, it’ll be the last time. He’s scared that with each passing day, his resolve to wake up, to keep going, diminishes until the day he finally gives up and decides to stop - to not keep going - to stay in hell, with his mother, with the memories that never happened and just stay there. 

And breathe. He just wants to breathe again. One deep breath - as the water surges into his gaping mouth, filling his lungs, the pleasure of finally inhaling too much that he doesn’t notice the burn in his lungs. All he notices is that the pain is gone and that he’s sleepy, and sleeping doesn’t seem like such a bad idea anymore. It doesn’t scare him anymore. Until he wakes up again.


End file.
